Sudha Ramachandran
As Christians around the world were flocking to churches for Easter services Sunday, Sri Lanka was already in mourning. A string of deadly, coordinated explosions early Sunday, which tore through churches and luxury hotels in Colombo and across the island nation, killed over 321 people, including some 38 foreigners, and injured around 500 others. Seven of the eight attacks were suicide bombings. A ninth explosion was prevented late Sunday when security personnel defused an improvised explosive device on the road to Colombo International Airport.
Among the churches attacked on Sunday morning was the 18th-century St. Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo, St. Sebastian’s Church at Negombo, and the Zion Church in Batticaloa in the island’s Eastern Province. The targeted hotels included the Cinnamon Grand, the Shangri-La and the Kingsbury—all in Colombo, with clientele who are largely Western tourists and businessmen. Later on Sunday, a bomb went off at a hotel near the National Zoo in Colombo and a suspected safe house on the outskirts of the capital.
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attacks, through a statement issued Tuesday by its official media arm, the Amaq news agency. Sri Lanka’s defense minister, Ruwan Wijewardene, previously told the Sri Lankan Parliament that Sunday’s serial suicide bombings were “in retaliation for the New Zealand mosque attack” in Christchurch last month.
On Monday, a Sri Lankan government spokesman told reporters that a little-known local Islamist outfit identified as the National Thowheeth Jama’ath, or NTJ, carried out the attacks. The NTJ has been increasingly active in the country; in 2016, the group’s secretary, Abdul Razik, was arrested in Sri Lanka on charges of inciting hatred against Buddhists. Last year, some NTJ members reportedly vandalized Buddhist statues in Mawanella in central Sri Lanka.
In early April, U.S. and Indian intelligence agencies reportedly passed information on to Sri Lankan authorities about the possibility of impending attacks. As The New York Times reported, “a security services briefing written at least 10 days before the bombings warned that National Thowheeth Jama’ath was planning to attack churches, but the government did not take action against the group.” Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said that he and many of his ministers never received any warnings.
Sri Lanka is not new to violence or terrorism. The brutal civil war that raged on the island between 1983 and 2009 claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 people. In addition to assassinating Sri Lankan leaders, suicide bombers from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam repeatedly blew up army camps, as well as civilian targets such as the Central Bank in Colombo and the city’s international airport. But after the civil war ended in 2009 with the Tamil Tigers decimated, suicide bombings were thought to have been relegated to Sri Lankan history.
Sunday’s bombings showed otherwise, brutally shattering Sri Lanka’s fragile peace. A multiethnic, multireligious and multilingual country, Sri Lanka has an overwhelmingly Sinhalese Buddhist population. Over 70 percent of Sri Lankans identify as Buddhist, 12.6 percent as Hindu, 9.7 percent as Muslim, and 6.2 percent Roman Catholic, according to 2012 census figures. Since independence from British rule in 1948, the Sri Lankan state has increasingly identified itself with the Sinhalese-Buddhist majority. This often took the form of a kind of Sinhalese-Buddhist supremacist project, which thrived by projecting ethnic Tamils as the state’s “enemy.” Since the Tamil Tigers’ defeat in 2009, hardcore Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalists needed of a new enemy. The island’s Muslims emerged as their target.
In their rush to round up suspects connected to the deadly bombings, Sri Lankan police must tread carefully.
Anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence have surged in Sri Lanka since 2011. Drawing on Islamophobia to justify their violence, Sinhalese-Buddhist mobs led by monks have repeatedly targeted Muslims, their shops, businesses and places of worship. Extremist outfits like the Bodu Bala Sena have run violent campaigns calling for the boycott of halal-certified meat and accusing Muslims in Sri Lanka of forcibly converting Buddhists to Islam. In 2018, an incident of road rage quickly escalated into attacks targeting Muslims. The violence was so serious and so rapid in its spread that the government had to impose a curfew and call out the army to bring the situation under control.
Sri Lankan analysts have been raising alarms about this systematic violence against Muslims, which echoes the violence by Sinhalese extremists against Tamils that played a role in stoking Tamil militancy. Dayan Jayatilleka, an academic and former diplomat, warned last year that “such violence cannot but have the effect of radicalizing Muslim youth and marginalizing Muslim moderates. We have come one step closer to the emergence of Islamist terrorism in Sri Lanka.”
These words proved to be all too prescient. With Sunday’s serial suicide bombings—the first in Sri Lanka by radical Islamists—this brand of terrorism has announced its bloody arrival on the island. These attacks are unlikely to be the last.
All the suicide bombers identified by the authorities as being involved in Sunday’s suicide attacks are Sri Lankan. But their links to global jihadists have been laid bare by the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility. Since 2015, young Sri Lankan Muslims have reportedly traveled to Iraq, Syria and other jihadist battlefields to fight alongside the Islamic State. With the Islamic State beaten back in Syria and Iraq, these young fighters could have returned home to pass on not only their expertise in making bombs and coordinating an attack like Sunday’s, but also the Islamic State’s deeper ideology, especially if NTJ activists were recruited by the Islamic State to act as its foot soldiers in Sri Lanka.
Sri Lankan police have already arrested dozens of young people in connection with Sunday’s attacks. In their rush to round up suspects, they must tread carefully. Sri Lankan police are notorious for detaining young people on the basis of their ethnic identity rather than their links to terrorism—something young Tamils know all too well from the civil war. Torture, death and disappearances while in police custody all fueled Tamil anger with the Sri Lankan state, contributing to mass support among Tamils for the insurgency. In the aftermath of Sunday’s bombings, Sri Lankan authorities must do everything to avoid similar episodes with the country’s Muslim population.
Sudha Ramachandran is an independent analyst based in India. She writes on South Asian political and security issues. Her work has appeared in Asia Times, The Diplomat, and other publications.
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